What You Pay Attention To Is the Life You're Living
- StevenMiyao
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Saturday morning, I walk to the farmers market with a list in my head: salad, tomatoes, kale, cheese, sausage, enough food for the week. I'm moving fast, eyes scanning stalls the way I'd scan a grocery aisle, and I get everything on the list in about twelve minutes. It's efficient. I also walk right past a little New Orleans-style jazz ensemble playing near the entrance without really hearing them, and I don't see a single person the whole time.
If you've spent years building something — a career, a team, a company — there's a good chance you do a version of this too, not just at the market.
At the pork farmer's stand, my last stop for the week's sausage, she was telling me, unprompted, about how she ended up doing this — she'd had a life in the city years ago and left it to move upstate and raise pigs, and now she's up before dawn a few mornings a week to make it to the market. I've been buying sausage from her for probably two years. I'd never once stopped long enough to actually hear any of it.
I realized how checked out I'd been. I'd walked past several people I actually know, at a market I go to nearly every week, without really seeing any of them. It wasn't just the people, either. The jazz ensemble at the entrance, the light on the tomatoes, the smell of basil from the stand that always has too much of it — none of that registered either. I was just moving past all of it, checking things off my list.
I know why I do this. I've spent a long time treating efficiency as the goal — how fast can I get through the list, how much can I get done, how far ahead of trouble can I stay. I don't actually want to live my life the most efficient way. I want to live it the most enjoyable way. But what you pay attention to is the life you're living. If most of my attention is always on what's next, I'm not going to notice the flowers, the people, the music, the actual beauty of the morning I'm standing in.
I had a coaching call a while back with a client I'll call Dev. He'd sent me a video of the golfer Scottie Scheffler talking about what it's actually like to win, and during our call, I pulled it back up so we could watch it together.
Scheffler says something like this: you work your whole life to win a tournament, you finally win one, and you get maybe two minutes of celebrating with your family before someone's already asking what you're doing next week. The feeling doesn't last long. But the reason it feels so good in the first place, he says, isn't really the trophy. For those two minutes, you're not thinking about the next thing. You're just there.
It got quiet on the call for a second. He's spent years chasing the next win, the next promotion, the next milestone, the way a lot of leaders do. What we kept coming back to is that the good part was never actually the finish line. It was those two minutes right after, when his mind finally stopped running ahead — the same two minutes he usually skips past on his way to whatever's next.
Dev asked how you're supposed to live like that when there's always another win to chase, another goal waiting. That's a fair question. I didn't have a clean answer for him. I still don't, fully, for myself either.
But I think it's close to what I missed at the farmers market. Nobody was going to fire me over the tomatoes, and there was nothing to get ahead of. I just couldn't turn the efficiency off, so I ran it anyway, on a Saturday morning, in a place built for slowing down and noticing things, not for getting through a list.
It's a small thing, finally hearing how the pork farmer ended up raising pigs. But it's also the difference between rushing past the parts of the market that were never on my list and actually stopping for them. One version has people and music and light in it. The other is a checklist with a farmers market backdrop.
I've been trying, since then, to notice when I'm rushing past something worth stopping for — not just at the market, but in meetings, in conversations with my kids that aren't problems to solve, and more than I'd like to admit, on coaching calls where I'm already three questions ahead instead of actually hearing the one my client just answered. I'm not great at it yet. Most Saturdays I still catch myself moving faster than the morning requires.
Last weekend, though, I stopped at the flower stand for no real reason, bought a bunch of dahlias I didn't need, and stood there for a minute actually listening to that little jazz ensemble play something I didn't recognize. It didn't accomplish anything. I stood there anyway and enjoyed every moment of it.
If you found this valuable, sign up for my email list, and I'll send you the new posts as soon as they are published.
-------------------
If you are looking for a coach and are interested in working with me, please contact me here.
-------------------
If you enjoyed it, please share it with others.
Comments